Chipper shredders have been utilized in consumer and professional applications for years. The purpose of these chipper shredders is to translate the longitudinal length and/or physical volume of various types of vegetation into smaller pieces having lesser volume, typically by chipping or shredding the incoming vegetation. Examples include feeding a three inch diameter tree limb into a chipper section in order to reduce it to small wood chips and/or feeding many bushel baskets of leaves or small sticks into the device (normally via a separate shredding section in consumer devices) so as to shred the same into small particles. Typically, as the diameter of the branch is increased and as the volume of the sticks/leaves increase, the power requirements also increase dramatically. This can create problems in that the chipper shredder unit must be designed for worst case scenarios. This can be expensive.